The Mountain (Elizabeth Bishop poem) Essay Questions

How does this poem resemble, and differ from, a villanelle?

"The Mountain" is not a villanelle, but it uses a pair of alternating, repeated refrains, making it closely resemble that form. A villanelle consists of five tercets and a quatrain, whereas this poem consists of nine quatrains. A traditional villanelle also follows a set rhyme scheme, which this poem does not. However, like a villanelle, each stanza of this poem concludes with one of two refrains, and the final stanza contains both refrains, repeated one after the other. Elizabeth Bishop is well-known for her formal poetry, including villanelles; this work clearly contains influence from that traditional form, even while ultimately following no set formula.

How does Elizabeth Bishop evoke her speaker's disorientation?

This poem's speaker feels confused and disoriented in large part as a result of her senses deteriorating: she cannot see or hear, for instance. Bishop uses figurative language to mimic these feelings in the reader—and within this figurative language, often employs synesthetic techniques, scrambling the senses, or else confuses the reader's sense of scale. For instance, in the poem's eighth stanza, Bishop writes that "bird-calls / dribble," pairing an aural image with a verb not usually linked to sound. She then writes that "waterfalls / go unwiped," using a verb generally associated with the human scale to discuss an object on a much larger, geologic one. In both cases, meanwhile, Bishop's metaphors place us in a strange, hostile landscape, so that everyday experiences are linked to extreme environments.